MAN CALLS 911, WIFE AFTER CRASH IN RIVER

YONKERS, N.Y. 
A man plucked from a plane crash in the icy Hudson River said Tuesday he wasn’t sure he’d survive, and he’d contacted 911 only after calling his wife and asking her to “tell the kids I love them.”

But thanks to the pilot’s skill, a fast-acting corps of policemen and one 12-year-old boy, he said, “the stars were aligned for us” and he and the pilot were rescued.

Christopher Smidt, a correctional sergeant from Colonia, N.J., spoke at a ceremony honoring his rescuers at City Hall in Yonkers. He and the pilot, Denise De Priester of East Windsor, N.J., were released Monday from a New York City hospital, where they were taken after spending 30 minutes in the frigid water after the Sunday evening crash. Smidt said he’s a student pilot and De Priester is his flight instructor, but on Sunday they were out for a sightseeing flight in her newly purchased 1967 Piper Cherokee. He said neither of them knew what went wrong, but at some point around 5:20 p.m., “We knew the plane was going to go down.”

De Priester flew the plane over the river and set it down smoothly, he said, off Yonkers north of New York City. “Without her skills, this story would be going another way,” Smidt said.

Once the plane was in the water, Smidt said, he called his wife, Karen. “I was hoping we would make it, but I didn’t know,” he said. “I told her: ‘We did crash in the Hudson. Tell the kids I love them.’ It was probably not the phone call any wife wants to hear.” The Smidts have a son, 10, and a daughter, 12. Smidt then called 911, and a dispatcher told pilot and passenger to get out of the plane in life vests before it sank. Getting into the water, chunky with ice, is “nothing I wish on anybody,” Smidt said. After about 15 minutes, he said, “I knew my body was starting to shut down … I couldn’t paddle.” Officer Daniel Higgins and several other off-duty or retired Yonkers police officers heard the distress call at their boat club on shore, and commandeered a boat to get to the plane. Higgins took his son, Daniel Jr., a seventh-grader. When Smidt was pulled into the boat, young Higgins said, “His hands were shaking, so I took off my jacket and he wrapped it around his hands so he wouldn’t freeze.”